I've just finished reading Blacklands, by Belinda Bauer. Terrific read!
From a review:
This astonishingly assured debut, from journalist and screenwriter Belinda Bauer, for once lives up to the hype. Set on Exmoor, it's the story of a cat-and-mouse game between 12-year-old Steven and Arnold Avery, the serial violator and killer of children who, 18 years before, murdered Steven's 11-year-old Uncle Billy and never revealed where he buried the body.
Steven's grandmother, soured by grief, spends her time standing at the front window waiting for her boy to return and sniping at her daughter, Steven's downtrodden mother Lettie. Steven's dad is long gone, replaced by a succession of short-term "uncles", and the house is damp, decaying and comfortless. Uncle Billy's bedroom, with a half-built Lego space-station on the floor and a Manchester City scarf pinned above the bed, is a shrine. Steven himself, unpopular and bullied at school, where even the teachers find it hard to identify him other than as the kid who smells faintly of mildew, spends his spare time digging holes on Exmoor, desperate to heal his family by finding Uncle Billy's corpse. When the scale of this task proves too much, he hits on the idea of writing to Avery for information.
This is one I read last year; it was so good, I have to reach back to recommend:
From a review:
Books: ‘The Guilty One’ by Lisa Ballantyne BY KATHY BLUMENSTOCK March 12, 2013
Kids killing other kids: The horror always jolts us because we remember childhood games and giggled secrets, not murder, yet the ugly presence of bullying paints a different reality. In Scottish author Lisa Ballantyne’s harrowing first novel, 8-year-old Ben Stokes is the victim, his broken body found at a local playground in suburban London. Ben’s 11-year-old neighbor and occasional playmate Sebastian Croll is accused of the crime.
Daniel Hunter, Sebastian’s lawyer, has represented gun-toting teens, streetwise juveniles who steal for drugs. He’s accustomed to youthful punks but is uncertain how to deal with a small boy for a client, especially one so lacking in emotion over a fresh tragedy: “Daniel glanced at Sebastian and tried to remember being eleven years old. He remembered being shy to meet adults’ eyes. He remembered nettle stings and being badly dressed. . . . But Sebastian was confident and articulate. A spark in the boy’s eyes suggested he was enjoying being questioned, despite the detective’s harshness.”
The boy’s nervous mother and aggressive father, whose business travels limit contact with his son, predictably deny Sebastian’s involvement. Daniel hopes forensic evidence will clear the child. Yet he is chilled by Sebastian’s macabre interest in the corpse.
The third installment of rollicking adventures from Britain's best loved entertainer.
Paul O'Grady shot to fame via his finest comic creation, the blonde bombsite Lily Savage. The first two volumes of his bestselling, critically acclaimed autobiography covered Paul's childhood and the origins of Lily. Now, for the first time, Paul tells the no-holds-barred story of Lily herself: The early years on stage, the journey to stardom and the hilarious misadventures along the way. Packed with extraordinary true stories which will simultaneously make your hair curl and your ribs shake with laughter, expect the unexpected in this surefire bestseller
Just reading this, loved the first two volumes. Lot of bumming in them though.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
I just finished 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and even though I'm definitely NOT a fan of Stephen King--really not a fan of anything in the "horror fiction" genre (which this isn't)--I've got to say I was extremely impressed and found it impossible to put down, even though it's 849 pages long. Apparently he first had the idea for the novel in 1971, but realized that it would require an incredible amount of research which, at the time, he was not prepared to undertake since he was teaching full-time back then. He's now matured somewhat as a serious writer and put in the necessary time and effort to do it right, and it shows. The real historical characters are brought to life convincingly; in the middle of the whole thing is a sweet but realistic love story, and the ending (and the epilogue) has a convincing air of inevitability. If you, like me, have a soft spot for a well-told time travel yarn, I highly recommend it.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
Hardcover: Jan 2007,
368 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2008,
368 pages.
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Book Summary
In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya’s mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres. Full of vigorous, unforgettable female characters, The Bastard of Istanbul is a bold, powerful tale that will confirm Shafak as a rising star of international fiction.
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
The title story of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s new collection, “Wild Child,” is a fictional retelling of the life of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, born to a peasant family in revolutionary France under an unhappy star. His early hindrances include muteness, a “lax” mind and an unsympathetic stepmother, who, when Victor is 5 years old, leads him to the forest and slits his throat. “Still, it was enough,” Boyle writes in one of this story’s wealth of haunting moments. “His blood drew steam from the leaves and he lay there in a shrunken, skeletal nest, night coming down and the woman already receding into the trees.”
wild CHILD
Stories
By T. Coraghessan Boyle
304 pp. Viking. $25.95
Related
Up Front: Wells Tower (January 31, 2010)
Excerpt: ‘Wild Child’ (February 12, 2010)
Times Topics: T. Coraghessan Boyle
Michiko Kakutani’s Review of ‘Wild Child’ (February 12, 2010)
For the next half-decade or so, Victor scuttles nude through the Languedoc undergrowth and crop fields, subsisting on newts, nestling birds and raw tubers. When, at age 8 or 9, he is smoked from a tree by a group of woodcutters, he has gone wholly feral, a “living, breathing atavism” betraying no more symptoms of humanity than a wild raccoon. What follows — a sweeping, birth-to-death biography charting Victor’s bedeviled return to civilization — is among the most richly realized stories of Boyle’s nearly 40-year adventure with the form.
The story’s closely observed middle section, in which Dr. Jean-Marc Itard of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris tries to teach Victor speech and reason, might have tempted a lesser writer to recast “The Miracle Worker,” or to brutalize a protagonist so frustratingly incapable of redemption. For that matter it might once have tempted Boyle, who earlier in his career wrote stories about a man cuckolded by a chimpanzee and about stoners huddled indoors on a day when blood then feces rain from the sky. But in “Wild Child” Boyle refreshingly, surprisingly refuses to play Victor for laughs. Moments that could easily topple into low farce — Victor eating a benefactor’s beloved elderly parrot or serially masturbating before mixed audiences — instead reach a desolate pathos. The story is subtle and intricate, and rouses the reader to conflicted sympathies: you ache for Victor’s rehabilitation, yet he’s so exasperatingly incorrigible, you simultaneously side with the bureaucrat who wants him castrated and imprisoned.
The story, wisely, refuses both courses. By the end, Victor is remanded to the custody of Monsieur Guérin, the groundskeeper at the deaf-mutes’ school, and his doting wife. Boyle could have gotten away with drizzling some treacle on the friendship between the older woman and the unmothered foundling with the knife wound showing through his beard, but he does not. Here, in one of the book’s most heartbreaking refusals of sentimental excess, Victor is hungry because Madame Guérin, on the day after her husband’s death, has taken to her bed:
“Ducking his head, he went into Madame Guérin’s room and stood over the bed gazing at the heaviness of her face, her skin gone the color of ash, the lines of grief that dropped her chin and tugged at the corners of her eyes. He was hungry. He hadn’t been fed all day. . . . He motioned to his mouth with his right hand and when Madame Guérin began to stir he took her arm and led her to the kitchen, pointing at the stove.”
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
That was Bill Clinton's love-life expose wasn't it?
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
If you enjoyed 'Paddington Bear" you might like this:
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
actually, I remember not enjoying that one , distinctly.
it was a good book, but even back in elementary school I didn t like children suffering.
I was more into Asimov s foundation trilogy back then. 1984, Bradbury. I didn t understand animal farm back then, but I read it anyway.
I was also into Albert payson terhune back then. I loved Treve and all his collie books.
of course, tom sawyer and huck finn too. my mother, bless her heart, gave away my first edition Tom Sawyer in a box of books after I moved out. I looked at prices a couple days ago. I should not have. darn....
